Like anything else in life, the process of composition can be shaped by unexpected circumstances. Michael Berkeley, whose Concerto for Orchestra has its world première at the BBC Proms next week, was in the midst of writing it last winter when news of the catastrophic Asian tsunami started filtering through.

"I always knew," he says, "that I wanted the slow movement to be a sort of grief-stricken but tranquil piece, and I was halfway through it when the tsunami happened on Boxing Day. Obviously, I felt horrified, but it permeated to a deeper level when I discovered that somebody I had worked with - Jane Attenborough - had died, together with her daughter and mother-in-law.

"Jane had done so much to promote art for everyone through the charitable Paul Hamlyn Foundation that I thought it would be apt to have a little piece of art that would be written in her memory. So I wrote to her husband and said I had it in mind to do this, and that it could remain private to me if he wanted, but he said he was very pleased."

Although the piece brings a note of threnody to the Proms' maritime theme this year, the Concerto for Orchestra is not specifically programmatic. "I often find, when I'm writing music that is not inspired by words," says Berkeley, "that the starting point is a kind of abstract sensibility, a mood, something I want to conjure up. The outer movements begin rather garishly, arrestingly, and then become rather more serious, so I knew that this movement needed to be completely contrasting.

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"Now I come to think of it, there's an element in the outer movements of a rather riotous sea at work, and this is the calm bit in between. I think with composers that that is quite often the case. Debussy, after all, put quite a few titles to his pieces after he had written them."

Nevertheless, the sea has been a potent influence on composers down the ages, as the Proms season shows. "It's the nearest natural phenomenon we have that describes in its abstract power the art of music," says Berkeley. "It's governed by rhythm, the moon, the tides, the incessant rolling.

"I think it's something about the fact that it can be so peaceful and beautiful and glistening, but also so malevolent and powerful. And then there's the way that light plays on water. Sometimes even when you look at a score - Debussy's La Mer is the famous one - they have a wave-like shape."

Berkeley, who presents Private Passions on Radio 3 and until last year ran the Cheltenham Festival, was brought up on the north Norfolk coast, and one of the first pieces he ever wrote was called Morston Marsh.

"To my horror, I remember that I sent it to Benjamin Britten to look at. He made some very nice comments, but I'm horrified to think I sent it, and it's long been withdrawn."

Britten was his godfather, the composer Lennox Berkeley his father. Was it a burden or an advantage to have these two luminaries of music looming over him?

"I think the advantages outweighed the disadvantages, inasmuch as I learned a lot from them. Strangely, I was never, as some children are, over-awed by having Lennox as my father, because I always had a feeling that I wanted to write rather different music. As far as Ben was concerned, it was just extraordinary to work as a boy chorister [in Westminster Cathedral] with someone who was such an all-round musician.

"The disadvantages, especially in this country, are that one gets rather labelled - programmed next to Lennox, compared with him, people looking for influences. One of the wonderful things about this year - I've been in Australia and Germany, having my music performed there - is that you come without that baggage. People simply take the music and react to it. That's very refreshing.

'I've always felt that there is a more overt emotional content to my music than in Lennox's, which is in a way Gallic and refined, whereas mine perhaps wears its heart on its sleeve a little more. There's an element of that in the slow movement of the Concerto for Orchestra. Whereas Lennox, if he got hold of something really touching, would just flick it but wouldn't necessarily turn the screw, I probably do want to become more Rachmaninov- or Tchaikovsky-like.

"I have Russian blood in me, for a start. My mother's father was an émigré from Lithuania, and I've often felt very drawn to Russian music. There is that side to me. I'm more impetuous."

Michael Berkeley's Concerto for Orchestra will be performed at the Proms next Tues.